Real Estate Brokers Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

The five rows are five different workers in the same occupation, from the 10th percentile ($36,920) to the 90th ($166,730). BLS suppresses cells that fail its reliability rules (n/p here) and caps the highest wages at $239,200+ a year or $115.00+ an hour; in this ladder that top code appears at the very top rows only.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 49,590 people in May 2024, 0.03% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 7,250 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 29.8% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Georgia, whose location quotient of 2.67 says this work is 2.67 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $48,200 at the 25th percentile, $72,280 at the middle, $114,220 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $129,810, a ratio of 4.5 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 45 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Iowa at $116,920; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Real Estate Brokers stands number 391 by employment and number 270 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Sales and Related Occupations, the group median wage is $56,320 across 22 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 28% more than its group median, and it supplies 0.4% of the group's 13,351,670 jobs. In 15 of the 42 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $72,280, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN is the largest metro employer with 1,300 jobs, 2.6% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Richmond, VA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $57,920 a year, against $85,050 in Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median annual wage of $72,280 works out to $6,023 a month before taxes, $2,780 per biweekly paycheck, and $1,390 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($48,200) to the 75th ($114,220) is worth $66,020 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Run the median through the paycheck calculator for a take-home estimate in your state, compare an offer against your current pay with the salary calculator, and check whether a raise actually beats prices with the raise vs inflation calculator.

To place a real offer: a salary of $79,508 would sit between the median ($72,280) and the 75th percentile ($114,220), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $48,200, is $24,080 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Sales and Related Occupations

Sibling occupations in Sales and Related Occupations: Cashiers, Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Except Technical and Scientific Products, Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel, First-Line Supervisors of Retail Sales Workers, Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents, Insurance Sales Agents. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.